Sexual Weirdtopia could just be "the internet comes to life"... e.g. everyone gets freaky without shame, but it turns out almost everyone is into something that's of absolutely no interest to you personally.

Or, to follow the public science example, the taboo is revealed to be as fundamental aspect of sexual arousal as the unknown is to the intellectual. The people demand a strict morality police after an era of total acceptance drains all the fun out of it. Everyone is fully expected to both seek out sexual thrills and aid in the swift punishment of anyone who seeks out sexual thrills: If you ask for a spanking you may be asking for a spanking.

I recently wondered whether it's possible that transhumans would spend parts of their lives in situations very similar to Dante's hell, complete with wailing and gnashing of teeth. Some have suggested that a bit of pain might be necessary to make all the pleasure we're supposed to get realizable, but I suggest that we might actually need quite a lot of it. If the only way to make people happy is to improve their lives, pushing them way down might turn out to be a reasonable solution. And some might choose that route to spice up whatever other sources of happiness there are. The fact that hellfire scares us fleshlings wouldn't matter to indestructible nanocyborgs.

Or maybe they would intentionally seek other things that I consider horrible. Like the risk of death - isn't that what people do already when they walk on a tightrope?

But Utopia and Dystopia are parts of reality and human existence, if we were to eliminate one of them, it would create unpredicted problems. Weirdtopia is a mutation of both, and it may work, or not.

Some have suggested that a bit of pain might be necessary to make all the pleasure we're supposed to get realizable.... If the only way to make people happy is to improve their lives....

Taken to a literal extreme (I don't know if that's your intent), the idea that pain is necessary for pleasure violates the Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle, or something like it. If pleasure without contrast palls, there's some neurological reason for this, one that we could work around in wireheading if we really wanted to. I think the most you can plausibly say is that for humanlike architectures, memories of suffering (not necessarily true ones) are necessary to appreciate pleasures more complex than heroin.

Personally, though, I think that there are already plenty of humans who, through genetics and/or introspective self-modification, can be perfectly happy without improving conditions.

Economic Weirdtopia: FAIth determines that the love of money actually is the root of ~75% of evil, so it's back to the barter system for us.

Sexual Weirdtopia: FAIth determines that the separatist feminists were right -- CEV requires segregation by sex. Homosexual men and lesbians laugh and laugh. Research on immersive VR becomes a preoccupation among the heterosexual majority in both segregated camps.

Not very plausible, but... "That's the thing about FAIth. If you don't have it, you can't understand it. And if you do, no explanation is necessary."

Economic weirdtopia: being rich is socially unacceptable; not because the society values equality, but because it's considered decadent and, in a certain sense, cheating. Weirdtopia's system of morality is virtue-based, and one of their highest virtues is a peculiar sort of self-sufficiency. Essentially, you're expected to be able to make yourself safe and comfortable by relying only on your wits and not on material goods. Needing to consume natural resources is accepted as a fact of life, but you should be able to do as much as possible with as little as possible. There is no concept of land ownership. In a loose sense of the word "own", you own the chattels that you produce with your own hands, but accepting the products of others' labor is a vice.

Exchanging knowledge and techniques is normal and acceptable. Being knowledgable about things that others have discovered is entirely amoral. Innovating earns you respect, but equally so regardless of whether you're the first to ever discover something or whether you figured out something widely-known on your own.

I think the most you can plausibly say is that for humanlike architectures, memories of suffering (not necessarily true ones) are necessary to appreciate pleasures more complex than heroin. Probably what matters is that there's some degree of empathy with suffering, whether or not that empathy comes from memories. Even in that weakened form the statement doesn't sound plausible to me.

Anyway it seems to me that utopianly speaking the proper psychological contrast for pleasure is sobriety rather than pain.

Neil Stephenson's new book Anathem does exactly what you suggest in your public understand of science Weirdtopia. Although, he also sequesters the scientists in "monasteries."

Economic... Weirdtopia: The world has an indirect economy. People trade status for predictive power to decide which ventures get the most attention and which resources to allocate to whom/what. Businesses are considered a weird anachronism of a begone era. People are free to do whatever they want with their status, except trade real property. (They can, however, use it to make the market grant favours if they want.) Life's necessities are always freely accessible.

Governmental... Weirdtopia: Every conflict is resolved either by consensus or moving away. There are even seed spaceships moving far away from Sol for the latter option. Non-violence isn't the rule, it's the law. Every intelligence agreed to remove violent urges. Non-violence has an extremely broad definition that not only covers force, but also deception, market manipulation, even advertising, bad manners and ostracism. Honesty is not expected, it just is; the only way people find out what the word means is through history classes.

It must have been intentional that all the Dystopia examples are almost one-to-one mappings of the real world? Except for the cognitive one. That one stands out as strange, perhaps intentionally - the message is that the world is fucked, and we've only one more chance as the last Dystopian calamity looms before us.

As to the assignment:

Economic Weirdtopia: The production economy is entirely automated. Supply is near infinite due to the constellation of this automation with asteroid mining. (The weird part is that the political will was somehow mustered to accomplish this.) Quite oddly, class inequalities are no longer sustainable - due to the occasional public slaughter of the rising bourgeoisie and power elites.

Sexual Weirdtopia: What you described as Utopia seems pretty damn weirdtopia to me.

Governmental Weirdtopia: Each person is a congressmen. "Leaders" are chosen by lot, or else elected on merit by representatives chosen by lot. Laws are written and interpretted by juries, who are themselves potentially open to prosecution for the verdicts which they render. Lawmakers can be charged criminally by the people for the laws they pass.

Technological Weirdtopia: The human race has turned into a civilization of AI flying around the solar system (in a Dyson sphere).

Cognitive Weirdtopia: "

"I'm not moving. You move. Bastard."

Fine, we'll both move to different Everett branches.

Weirdtopia: A deeper understanding of anthropics leads us to consider quantum immortality valid, as long as the death is instantaneous. We prepare an electron in a spin up state, and measure its angular momentum on the x axis. Left, your faction terminates, right, mine.

sexual wierdtopia: It is mandated by the central processor that participants stop to ask 'are we having fun yet?' every 60 seconds in order to allow the partners to elucidate and record the performance of the previous minute. Failure will result in the central processor rescheduling the desire impulse, and scheduling some other emotional context. This is not just for training, reason stipulates sexual performance can always be further optimized.

Governmental Weirdtopia: Double-blind democracy. Yearly presidents are chosen at random. (couldn't be worse than our current system) The catch is that the person chosen to be the leader has absolutely no idea that they are the leader. They are followed around and monitored, and anything uttered resembling a decree is put into action if it doesn't violate the constitution. The decrees are only put into place after their term expires so they don't catch on. Quick decision-making such as treaties are wars are left up to a streamlined unicameral legislative body.

Economic Weirdtopia: Market is so efficient that nobody has to work, and everybody's basic needs can be sustained by just asking any charity. This prosperity hyperactivates everybody's social status chasing instincts, so people work harder and longer than ever, feeling inadequate if they don't earn more than their peers, and spending most of what they earn on making their 3d virtual avatars look better than other people's 3d virtual avatars.

Sexual Weirdtopia: Reproduction is completely separated from sex, children are taken care of by free market and government services with just token parental involvement, and all STDs all eliminated. This first leads to everybody having sex with everybody else, but people got bored with vanilla sex soon and many sexual identification based on shared sexual fetishes emerge. They replace religions, languages, citizenships and ethnicities as leading in/out-group indicators, and somehow Middle East is still in endemic state of war, now between guro and furry.

Governmental Weirdtopia: Government knows everything about everybody, but doesn't abuse it because everybody knows about everything it does. Universal transparency makes corruption impossible, so people are no longer interested in governing or lobbying and governments atrophy with time.

Cognitive Weirdtopia: Combination of efficient search and prediction markets made all knowledge easily available, so all schools shut down. People don't even learn basic mathematics any more, as easily available mathematical coprocessors for brains do that more efficiently and without prevalent human biases. People find themselves a niche hobby that wasn't explored yet and learn everything about that yet. If they're lucky it might get popular later and they'll make decent money in prediction market out of it.

Sexual Weirdtopia: Double-blind Sexocracy .... you get the idea.

Two roads diverged in the woods. I took the one less traveled, and...

Utopia: that has made all the difference. Dystopia: had to eat bugs until Park rangers rescued me. Wierdtopia: got to eat the bugs until the rangers threw me out.

For an example of a sexual wierdtopia, I'd recommend the movie zerophilia. Kinky, but not porn, and heck, my library has 2 copies.

Stranger in a Strange Land may have been an attempt to describe a Weirdtopia.

Everyone is orgasmium. And strangely enough, they don't think it's all that horrible.

Jorge Luis Borges, The Babylon Lottery, 1941. Government by lottery. Living under a lottery system leads to greater expectation of random events, greater belief that life is and should be ruled by randomness, and further extension of the lottery's scope, in a feedback loop that increases until every aspect of everyone's life is controlled by the lottery.

Food Weirdtopia: We see the same type of taboos or enthusiasms that we see about sex in this world. The Catholic Church declares that artificial sweeteners are a perversion; there are pro-starvation articles at feministing; the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate weighs 300 pounds...

Sexual Weirdtopia:

The world envisioned in the strange philosophies of E. Yudkowsky, where the sentient citizens of terra-gen civilization have convinced themselves that the only noble pursuit is becoming pregnant. Sex has evolved into an elaborate emotional and intellectual ritual, combining features of philosophy, mathematics, and social activity. Emotional attachment to 'ephemeral' events does not come naturally to these beings, so sex is nearly always "for keeps," with at least one party (occasionally more) becoming impregnated with a unique seed-entity. Due to the dynamic way in which the seed-entity is designed through the interactions of the parents during sex, the cognitive distance between citizens is often staggering. Still, most citizens agree that no endeavor can match sex in importance. What little terra-gen culture does not center around making one another pregnant is seen as an idle diversion with little value and no consequences.

Sexual Weirdtopia: If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister? by Theodore Sturgeon

Economic: I cited Asimov on the previous post, so let's stick with that. The Computer effectively runs a planned economy, using massive information-gathering and computing power to overcome the Hayekian knowledge problem. It really does know what is best. Everyone is free to listen to The Computer or not, but you know that your decision would be less efficient for accomplishing your goals. Such rebellions are useless, however, because The Computer's prediction capabilities include whether or not you will take its advice, and it acts accordingly to make sure you get the best results anyway.

Sexual: With no need for biological reproduction, the sex drive is eliminated in favor of other interests. Some people continue to have sex; as a hobby, it has a public reputation somewhere between (the current view of) Civil War re-enactments and juggling.

Governmental: Initiation of violence is the chief rule. With powerful AI and ubiquitous nanotech, it is recognized that anyone can inflict his will upon a large area in a short time. Pre-emptive execution of possibly unfriendly biologicals is the major task of government.

And I thought this blog was about artificial intelligence!

Yoshitoshi Abe does a decent job at describing an Afterlife Weirdtopia in Haibane Renmei. Wikipedia could be seen as Knowledge Weirdtopia that became reality.

Economic Weirdtopia: The knowledge of the diminishing marginal utility of wealth is widespread. Most people don't care about money beyond comfortable living. Work is efficient and takes an hour a day. Social status is no longer determined by occupation, but by the tastefulness of pasttimes, as defined by your chosen subculture. The few rich people will have little use of their money, since most products are valued by functionality, not signaling potential. Most people watch TV or play video games 10 hours a day. The 'elite' does art, science and philosophy insofar it is fun.

Sexual Weirdtopia: There is are continuous speed dating markets for all types of sexual partners, from vanilla to maximally kinky. Online sex and matchmaking dies because the partners need to see each other in real life, and there is no need to hide availability or meet people at remote locations. Socio-sexual networks will be flexible en ever-changing, pair bonding is rare.

Economic Weirdtopia: There is no economy. Everyone lives a self sufficient existence on isolated farms. Think Solaria.

Few of these weirdtopias seem strangely appealing in the same way that conspiratorial science seems strangely appealing.

It will be sad if sex disappears only because there is no need for biological reproduction.

Bah, steven is right. We have a bunch of weird dystopias. On the other hand, "strangely appealing" could be idiosyncratic. I think it was Harry Harrison's Deathworld 2 that made a neo-medieval dystopia from groups that held scientific secrets in enclaves. Miguel Antonio would be sad if sex disappeared, but I know some people who would be much more content without it, while others are really excited about Civil War re-enactments. By my count, speculations on sexual weirdtopias are well in the lead in the comments; is this just normal for our species, or are OB regulars more interested in weird sex?

Yeah, strangely appealing takes more work. I think we're looking at premature search-halts here. You don't have to go with your very first idea.

Most of these are random SF Weirdtopias, not fun-theoretical Weirdtopias and many have already been done in SF, too. Actually most of these are plain old Utopias or Dystopias.

But I would give credit to Joe's morality police, Mike Blume's Everett-splitting society, Edward's double-blind democracy, and Tomasz's "somehow Middle East is still in endemic state of war, now between guro and furry".

Political Weirdtopia: Citizens decide it is unfair for a democracy to count only the raw number of people who support a position without considering the intensity with which they believe it. Of course, one can't simply ask people to self-report the intensity with which they believe a position on their ballot, so stronger measures are required. Voting machines are redesigned to force voters to pull down a lever for each issue/candidate. The lever delivers a small electric shock, increasing in intensity each second the voter holds it down. The number of votes a person gets for a particular issue or candidate is a function of how long they keep holding down the lever.

In (choose one: more/less) enlightened sects of this society, the electric shock is capped at a certain level to avoid potential fatalities among overzealous voters. But in the (choose one: more/less) enlightened sects, voters can keep pulling down on the lever as long as they can stand the pain and their heart keeps working. Citizens consider this a convenient and entirely voluntary way to purge fanaticism from the gene pool.

The society lasts for several centuries before being taken over by a tiny cabal of people with Congenital Insensitivity to Pain Disorder.

Personally I don't find the scientific weirdtopia strangely appealing. Finding knowledge for me is about sharing it later.

Utopia originally meant no-place, I have a hard time forgetting that meaning when people talk about them.

I'd personally prefer to work towards negated-dystopias. Which is not necessarily the same thing as working towards Utopia, depending on how broad your class of dystopia is. For example rather than try and maximise Fun, I would want to minimize the chance that humanity and all its work were lost to extinction. If there is time and energy to devote to Fun while humanity survives then people can figure it out for themselves.

Utopia originally meant no-place, I have a hard time forgetting that meaning when people talk about them.

The term "utopia" was a deliberate pun on "outopia" meaning "no place" and "eutopia" meaning "good place". It seems doubtful that Thomas More actually intended to depict his personal ideal society, so one might say that Utopia is the original Weirdtopia.

I think we're looking at premature search-halts here.

I plead no contest.

Well, this may not quite fit the personal criteria for a wierdtopia, since this is quite close to what I would consider a utopia, but it stands fairly far apart from the other scenarios presented so far, so I figured I might as well post it:

Tech Everyone is forcibly uploaded, the surface of the earth is scanned in super-duper-hi-fi precision and then used for computronium to house the newly uploaded minds. An overseer AI is created that sends out a sphere of near-light speed probes to convert the rest of the stuff in our future light cone into computronium.

Cog Everyone stays more or less at the level they are, since they are all supposed to pull themselves higher mentally by their own will, and almost everyone is too busy screwing around for the foreseeable future.

Gov't Doesn't exist, since everyone has their little (or rather huge) chunk of cyberspace where they can summon any simulacra of beings that they want. The overseer AI has discovered that there is no verifiable difference between conscious and unconscious algorithms (but the scanned in humans are almost definitely conscious) so it is satisfied with providing everyone with a way to create human simulacra that are probably not conscious and allowing the probably conscious humans to do whatever it is they want to them (simulating earth histories is a popular hobby).

People are allowed to visit other people's created worlds, and some even do it quite a lot. Violence can only happen if the victim allows themselves to be hurt, and those conflicts that can't be resolved without emotional damage (eg love triangle) are handled as they are now, except without the possibility of suicide (well, you can do it in theory, but only if the overseer analyzes you and sees that you would *never* recover from your emotional loss, and that's never happened so far). At most, the hurt party researches neuropsychology for a while before invariably getting distracted.

Econ Similarly doesn't exist except for what people want to make up in their fake worlds. The overseer oversees (duh) the actual RL acquisition of material for more computronium, and distributes it to the measly amount of humans that want to use even a small fraction of it.

Sex One of the biggest distractions. This field got researched to a fairly decent level, so people get to have many of their craziest fantasies fulfilled. To uploaded people, the difference between another uploaded human and a simulacrum is academic, so most create elaborate worlds for their satisfaction. Many also have real loving relationships, but things like "public" perceptions of sex don't really play a role in anyone's life.

Zubon, from what I've read of Austrians they laugh at the claim (I think Gunnar Myrdal made it) that you can solve the knowledge/calculation problem with such a computer as a misunderstanding of the problem.

Yvain, you are groping toward one of the oldest forms of democracy.

aoeuid, that's the kind of Future I grew up in, and that I'm trying to get away from; it hasn't been discussed here because it's too obvious.

Why, oh why haven't we robotized every job already? Why aren't our computers smarter? Why is there so much manual labor still around? A thin slice of humanity has several trillion of disposable money. Trillion. Millions of millions. What are they buying with it? Gold chains? ...because nothing really impressive seems to be happening. There's a lot of planning and talk, but happening... it ain't happenin'.

TGGP, Hayek argued some reasons why it is not even theoretically possible for central planners to have all the relevant information, making it more than a calculation problem. But if we are picking up utopias and weirdtopias from sci fi, we can let Asimov have his; which one you count that story from I, Robot as presumably depends on your views of central planning. Or maybe it is a dystopia with amputation of destiny, as the story's conclusion implies.

If we get that technological utopia and have thumbnail-sized supercomputers that predict as well as Omega, maybe they can pull it off. If I can simulate your brain perfectly, I can presumably capture that knowledge. If we are all uploaded, some computer(s) will be able to simulate all our brains at once.

Roko, Instead of Shakespeare, perhaps resolve to get a sense of the knowledge, rationality, and general motivations and outlook of a larger set of people? Knowing who makes up our economy, governments, medical systems, and research institutions is as important as knowing how a lightbulb works for making good decisions in the world.

I'm far from perfect on this one; if anyone has suggestions for illuminating conversations to have with strangers, do share.

It's so sad that economics hasn't progressed over the last 100 years or so, beyond either "extreme central planning doesn't work" or "extreme unregulated free market doesn't work". Nothing, save Gesell and Yunus. Have you ever considered that cdo's, cds's and letters of credit were not invented for their own sake, but for a real world reason? What's going to be scarce in weirdtopia? The normal? Or, if I can have all the gadgets I want and never need a job or a place to live, talent and hard work? I think a lot of dissatisfaction comes from 1) frustration, 2) popculture. Our imagination is stuck in either LOTR or Star Trek. The reality is underground. Under people's noses a sea change is going on. Physics and philosophy have been demoted and biology rules. What if a patient cured himself (any affliction) by exchanging, through bodily fluids, the necessary molecules synthesized by the body of another human? Why should humans not install photosynthesis in themselves? No need for fancy electricity, just light. Sure handy for spacetravel. I think people's sensibilities have been numbed, so they don't recognize, for example, that our culture is musically best typified by death metal. The drilling, shrieking, roaring... wait! any modern building site. The reason "it ain't happenin" is that evolution just bumbles along, frame by frame. It has no direction. We see the snail's pace and demand a two hour film. But if you want a film, the answer is to go out and construct it.

Economic weirdtopia . . .after the Ultimate Crash of 2105, the best ems got together and created a new universal atomic currency, based on not just on gold, but on reserves of quark-gluon plasma made from gold nuclei in deference to mankind's historical preferences.

Sexual weirdtopia. . .since death is over through nanotechology or uploading into perfect android bodies you can get on a 3-year-lease, there's no need for birth. If ems want to create a new being from themselves, they just copy different brain modules from the catalog and create the perfect "children" who share all the traits & values they want them to have.

Technological weirdtopia. . .once we found gravitational waves, we decided few things were as beautiful as watching black hole spin-flips. How majestic to see the jets reverse - like Niagara Falls but much much better. They become the new lunar eclipses. The AIs decide for retro-aesthetic reasons to resort to communicating only via gorgeously polished and highly decorated ebony "punch cards."

Cognitive weirdtopia. . .since unlimited thinking power is available via copy & merge for ems, or simple access to AIs, thought has become devalued. Who wants it when it isn't rare? Real physical sensation becomes more highly valued than ever, and people pile hop into giant "cuddle piles" with numerous artificial cats just to feel the warmth.

Governmental weirdtopia. . .we discover the aliens learned long ago how to encode their whole being into several kinds of waveforms. Thus the first message SETI finds is actually the ambassador itself. It informs us of the spectral rules governing the bands given to various alliances and tells us where to find the repeaters. The cosmos is governed by a universal FCC.

All-encompassing weirdtopia:

Humanity continues as it has for the last several thousand years, learning new things, changing its views, constantly refining its thoughts and actions. It makes mistakes and learns from them, or fails to learn and repeats them, repeatedly. It's splintered into many groups who hate each other for no particular reason, create wars, famine, and disease, despite wealth and cures. There is a great disparity in all things between different people in different places, including knowledge, wealth, and enjoyment of life.

Evolution turns out to hold sway even once humanity tries taking over the process, and countless lines of human and technological enhancement become 'extinct' while others flourish to take their place. Utopia, dystopia, and weirdtopia exist together in varying degrees and in different locations among humanity's diaspora, forming a highly complex, dynamic, adaptive universe that continues on despite all the great changes.

Your science weirdtopia seems a lot like how MMORPGs work now, to a large degree. There's an internally consistent set of world-rules, but they won't tell you what they are. Sure, people are happy to share their experimental results with you, but you have to go looking. Spoilers aren't left out in the open.

Why would we need the weirdtopia science to be performed on the physical world? Wouldn't new world-rules, optimized for the fun of learning them be better?

Sexual Weirdtopia: What goes on consensually behind closed doors doesn't (usually) affect the general welfare negatively, so it's not a matter of social concern. However, that particular bundle of biases known as "romantic love" has led to so much chaos in the past that it's become heavily regulated.

People start out life with the love-module suppressed; but many erstwhile romantics feel that in the right circumstances, this particular self-deception can actually better their lives. If a relationship is going well, the couple (or group, perhaps) can propose to fall in love, and ask the higher authorities for a particular love-mod for their minds.

Every so often, each loving relationship must undergo an "audit" in which they have the love-mods removed and decide whether to put them back in. No unrequited love is allowed; if one party ends it, the other must as well...

Economic: everyone owns a nanoassembler but mass production and copy operations are prohibited. Sexual: age of consent is raised to 600 years.

So, the question is "Whose utopia is it anyway?". Clearly not everyone would agree upon these utopia/dystopia definitions, so if future AIs are to be created instilled with the noblest of human values whose value system should their BIOS contain? Of course this requires you to confront the notion that humans have somewhat diverse value systems, not all of which may be friendly towards science or western libertarian thinking.

Let's say this is supposed to be a economic weirdtopia - or something like that.

Let's suppose there is more or less constant connectivity to internet equivalent so that you can 'see' whatever other people are broadcasting as information. Twitters and facebooks of the new era are widely adopted. Essentially this will also make possible to have near perfect sousveillance.

This is world where people find meaning to their lives through stories - endless damsels in distress and knights in shining armor, wise wizards, devious politicians and whatever. People learn to change their roles in search of a meaning - perhaps broadcasting new information on their social networks. Helpful CEO of yesterday might be todays villainous power broker as boredom was creeping to their local social network and something had to be done.

One can use anything that creates a more meaningful story out of the situation. People constantly pay attention to other people to see what kind of stories they living out while trying to experience stories themselves. When someone helps you to find a more meaningful shape to the situation by acting out some role that was apparently missing you reward them with your attention and cooperation.

This would create a world where you can fairly expect that world is pleasantly suprising and complex. Everyone could expect to live out pleasant fantasies and to participate stories of other people. They would create and carve meaning from their social network.

The art of combining several stories would be perhaps most highly appreciated skill - it would mean people can expect that when spending more time around you they can find out new kinds of experiences - surprises of most pleasant kind. Letting those people to use whatever resources they need would be good idea - after all they have created interesting situations previously from whatever has been at hand.

Problem with this skill of combinatorial storytelling is of course that you have to understand what kind of stories other people are experiencing - keep tabs on people - and quickly see how those stories might be combined with stories of other people.

You could still have recurring characters in story of your life as before - and more notably perhaps there would be more chances for having your personal villains and antagonists to whom you appear as a antagonist - match made in story world. Finally killing anyone would hardly make any sense - why kill someone interesting and why kill someone uninteresting? It is so much better just leave them hanging off the cliff just to have them return later back to you with a vengeance.

Keeping tabs on lives of other heroes and villains would be interesting too - most highly talented people living out most extravagant lives would be appreciated as people setting up new standards to aspire to. Not because their trappings are better, but because they have even more fun stories to live through. They might have new and better stories that you could perhaps adapt to your own life.